31 Facts About Karl Radek

Karl Berngardovich Radek was a revolutionary and writer active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I and a Communist International leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution.

Karl Radek joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and took part in the 1905 Russian Revolution in Congress Poland.

Karl Radek helped establish the Communist Party of Germany after the revolution began, and spent a year in prison for his role in the Spartacist uprising.

Karl Radek later recanted his views and was re-admitted to the Party.

Nevertheless, during the Great Purge Karl Radek was accused of treason and arrested.

Karl Radek was found guilty as a chief defendant at the second Moscow Trial in 1937 and sentenced to 10 years of penal labor.

Karl Radek died in a labor camp in the Urals two years later.

Karl Radek took the name Radek from a favourite character, Andrzej Radek, in Syzyfowe prace by Stefan Zeromski.

Karl Radek joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1904.

In 1907, after his arrest in Poland and his escape from custody, Karl Radek moved to Leipzig in Germany and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany, working on the Party's Leipziger Volkszeitung.

Karl Radek re-located to Bremen, where he worked for Bremer Burgerzeitung, in 1911, and was one of several who attacked Karl Kautsky's analysis of imperialism in Die Neue Zeit in May 1912.

In September 1910, Karl Radek was accused by members of the Polish Socialist Party of stealing books, clothes and money from party comrades, as part of an anti-semitic campaign against the SDKPiL.

Karl Radek dissolved the commission in July 1912, after it had failed to come to any conclusion, and in August pushed a decision through the party court expelling Radek.

In 1912 August Thalheimer invited Karl Radek to go to Goppingen to temporarily replace him in control of the local SPD party newspaper Freie Volkszeitung, which had financial difficulties.

Karl Radek accused the local party leadership in Wurttemberg of assisting revisionists to strangle the newspaper due to the paper's hostility to them.

Karl Radek took part in the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, siding with the left.

In 1917 Karl Radek was one of the passengers on the sealed train that carried Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries through Germany after the February Revolution in Russia.

Karl Radek was arrested after the Spartacist uprising on 12 February 1919 and held in Moabit Prison until his release in January 1920.

On his return to Russia Karl Radek became the Secretary of the Comintern, taking the main responsibility for German issues.

Karl Radek was removed from this position after he supported the KPD in opposing inviting representatives of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany to attend the 2nd Congress of the Comintern, pitting him against the Comintern's executive and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In mid-1923, Karl Radek made his controversial speech 'Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void' at an open session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

Karl Radek was part of the Left Opposition from 1923, writing his article 'Leon Trotsky: Organizer of Victory' shortly after Lenin's stroke in January of that year.

Later in the year at the Thirteenth Party Congress Karl Radek was removed from the Central Committee.

Karl Radek was sacked from his post at Sun Yat-Sen University in May 1927.

Karl Radek was expelled from the Party in 1927 after helping to organise an independent demonstration on the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution with Grigory Zinoviev in Leningrad.

In early 1928, when prominent oppositionists were deported to various remote locations within the Soviet Union, Karl Radek was sent to Tobolsk and a few months later moved on to Tomsk.

Karl Radek helped to write the 1936 Soviet Constitution but, during the Great Purge of the 1930s, he was accused of treason and confessed, after two and a half months of interrogation, at the Trial of the Seventeen in 1937, the so-called Second Moscow Trial.

Karl Radek was sentenced to 10 years of penal labor.

Karl Radek was reportedly killed in a labor camp on Stalin's orders following a fight with a fellow Left Opposition inmate named Varezhnikov.

Karl Radek has been credited with originating a number of political jokes about Joseph Stalin.

Karl Radek was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988, under Mikhail Gorbachev.